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Editorial: Open Access: One Goal, Many Pathways
No full textHow better to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Library Resources Technical Services (LRTS) becoming fully open access than an issue chock-full of insights, experiences, practices, and data on open access in library settings? The work published in this issue aligns with several of the obstacles we encountered in making LRTS open and available to all. Namely, despite two decades of growth, open access publishing remains fraught with misconceptions, unrealized benefits, and logistical challenges. In library settings, open access poses opportunity and uncertainty in equal measure and brings to light competing demands for resources. The complexities and expenses associated with open access have led to the perceived and material exclusion of many, including librarians—which of course has considerable implications for equity. This issue highlights the work of librarians who have not been sidelined by challenges, but rather embraced them to investigate how open access does—or does not—align with institutional goals, budgets, and workflows
Cost, Advocacy, and a Mechanism for Transformation: The Proposed Power of Open Access Funds
No full textAs paid open access becomes a mainstream academic practice, stakeholders must evaluate their role in the system. While open access advocates develop new ways to support the publication process and funding structure, commercial publishers continue to pivot to maintain their profit, relevance, and power in the publication system. This article provides the details of Montana State University’s Open Access Author Fund as an evaluation of the service and its impact on the local publishing ecosystem. As stewards of publicly funded knowledge, it is essential to critically analyze each new publishing route before adopting and supporting it. Especially when models claim to transform the system, librarians need to understand how an action changes the system, for whom, and at what cost
Public Awareness and Advocacy Committee: Serving Well: Using Professional Toolkits to Fill Gaps in Service Knowledge
No full textLibraries being accessible for all is one of the core tenets of modern librarianship, but a perennial concern for all librarians is reaching and advocating for marginalized and underserved communities. There are many reasons why a segment of the community isn’t using the library—from a lack of physical accessibility to not knowing what resources are offered. The following six toolkits from ALA divisions and other institutions focus on serving the needs of marginalized populations
Public Awareness and Advocacy Committee: Going Outside Your Comfort Zone
No full textThe ALSC Public Awareness and Advocacy Committee is calling on ALSC membership to take part in our 2024 ALSC Advocacy Challenge. Because advocacy starts with YOU!This year, we challenge you to reach out to someone outside of your typical network.Identify one person outside your library who shares library values like inclusion, freedom to read, equity, etc. Maybe they’re an educator, counselor, religious leader, organizer, or advocate. It can be someone you already know or someone you don’t know yet. Talk about ALSC, about librarianship, make a connection. Here are some examples from our committee members
Parenting with Dyslexia: One Father’s Creative Approach to Storytime
No full textParents and caregivers of young children naturally want to set their kids up to succeed academically as best they can. However, how do caregivers who they themselves struggle with a learning disability approach supporting their children’s early literacy development?Despite the fact that 15 to 20% of the population has a language-based learning disability, there is little research on how this condition impacts caregivers while their children develop their language skills. This case study begins to address this lack of research, by focusing on how a father with dyslexia supports his almost three-year-old as she grows up, how his dyslexia affects storytime, and his strategies for overcoming his reading challenges
How Far…or Not…Have We Come? Gender Portrayals in Award-Winning Children’s Picture Books: 2018–2022
No full textThis quote from the end of the hallmark study Sex-Role Socialization in Picture Books for Preschool Children (1972) was an assertion of the power of stories on the lives of children and a call for different stories—ones with fair representation for women and the eradication of harmfully rigid gender stereotypes. More than fifty years have passed since the publication of this seminal work, and it is now widely acknowledged that “children’s books reflect cultural values and are an important instrument for persuading children to accept those values.”Picture books are of particular concern because they are most popular with children who are in the initial stages of gender identity formation. According to researchers Gooden and Gooden, “Around age five, children start to model the behaviors of adults, becoming more independent and develop their identities.” As such, picture books play a key role in gender socialization. Gender itself is a social construct which has historically been depicted as a binary concept in the United States—differentiating what is feminine from what is masculine. However, there is increasing recognition that gender is more fluid and that gender nonconforming identities exist. Picture books are uniquely poised to reflect gender presentations in society because not only do they incorporate verbal textual clues, but also visual clues that indicate sex characteristics as well as clothing and other physical identifiers that are considered feminine or masculine. These multifaceted presentations of gender are potent for the reader, but have historically been rife with stereotypes and inequity
Book Review: Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge
No full textBonn, Bolick, and Cross’s work, Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, presents the macro and micro of scholarly communication (“scholcomm”), the “what” and the even more important “why” and “how” of scholcomm work in libraries, and thoroughly examines openness in its many different forms: open access (OA), open data, open educational resources (OER), and open science. While its length qualifies it as a textbook, the way it’s written makes it an enjoyable, information-packed read for both library workers with minimal scholcomm knowledge, as well as those with deeper knowledge and expertise. Where other texts appear to break down scholcomm and openness into key concepts like policy and infrastructure—separate from the implementation of open access in academic libraries1—Bonn, Bolick, and Cross’s textbook lays it all out for readers in an organized manner
Book Review: Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, Fifth Edition
No full textThe fifth and latest edition of Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction successfully brings a classic cataloging textbook fully into the present day. Originally published in 1980 by Lois Mai Chan, it was last updated with the fourth edition in 2016. The new edition, with Athena Salaba now as the lead author, largely preserves the outline of previous editions: six main parts encompassing Introduction, Record Production and Structure, Resource Description and Access, Subject Access and Controlled Vocabularies, Organization of Library Resources, and Encoding and Records of Bibliographic and Authority Data. It also adds some small but welcome updates to the sections on metadata schemas and encoding to adjust for standards that have come further into use or become fully outdated, and introduces a completely new part 7, “Cataloging Ethics.” Its biggest accomplishment is a major revision and expansion of part 3, “Resource Description and Access (RDA),” to include full coverage of Official RDA, introduced since the publication of the previous edition. Where that edition had four chapters on Original RDA, the new edition condenses these slightly into two chapters, rearranging rather than excising content, and adds two fully new chapters on Official RDA that walk readers through its elements, structure, and potential usage in metadata descriptions
Membership Committee: Membership Profiles
No full textJennifer Minehardt, Head of Youth Services, Perrot Memorial Library, Old Greenwich, CTAleezah Rockler, Children’s Library Associate, District of Columbia Public Librar
Bringing Conservation to the Next Generations
No full textThe Earth is changing faster than it spins. And with climate change affecting all generations, two artists of this generation are celebrating the life of British nature lover and documentarian David Attenborough.Explaining the importance of the global crisis, and our place in it, is no easy task. Husband and wife duo John and Hayley Rocco have taken it on in Wild Places (Putnam, 2024), a non-fiction picture book about Attenborough, animals, and the world in which we all inhabit